De-lurking here. Finishing up my semester at Pratt, student project due on Cataloging Cultural Objects. If you can take a few minutes to answer as many of the questions as you can, maybe even add some comments, I’ll be very grateful. (Any responses you wish kept off the record will be honored.)

Thanks, Louis in Brooklyn.

1-Do you/your institution use CCO? If so, for how long? If not, any particular reasons?

2-If you don’t use CCO, how familiar are you with it? Self-study, or from other work/interests?

3-How effective are the CCO content standards? Also, do you find it easy to use/implement?

4-What are your favorite/least favorite features? (What do you like best/least about it?)

5-BIG one for my project: Have you seen users’ image searches improve with CCO? Why or why not?
(Any anecdotes, examples, will be extremely appreciated.)

6-CCO: Wave of the future? Or not enough to achieve goals?

7-How easy is CCO to use with other descriptive standards tools & metadata element sets?

8-Whether you use CCO or not, does your work entail more of documenting cultural objects or describing images of objects?

If there is anything you’d like to add that I haven’t addressed, please feel free to include.

Thanks in advance for everyone’s help! Hope I can either return the favor and/or pay it forward, and have a great holiday season, all!

Ian Sheridan’s An Art Librarian’s Glossary, published in 1984 by the IFLA Section of Art Libraries. It’s a dictionary type book of art terms in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German

Haggar, Reginald George. A dictionary of art terms: painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving and etching, lithography and other art processes, heraldry. [1962] reprinted 1984 According to Marmor and Ross¹ Guide to the Lit. of Art History 2: Glossary contains separate lists of French, German, and Italian terms, With English equivalents, useful for students preparing for graduate art history language exams.

There’s an interesting discussion going on over there, including some mentions of an IBSN (Internet Blog Serial Number). Is ArLiSNAP a serial? Should it have an ISSN? An IBSN (http://ibsn.org/register.php)? I thought about going ahead and registering us for an IBSN, but then wondered what that would imply about ArLiSNAP as a “publication”, when I tend to think of it more as a community. Your thoughts?

Announcing the next meeting of the Midwest Art Catalogers Discussion Group.

The Midwestern Art Cataloging Discussion Group (MACDG) is a loosely organized group of librarians who meet three times a year. Anyone interested in art and architecture or visual resources cataloging is welcome to attend.

MACDG will hold the next meeting at the Art Institute of Chicago on February 23, 2007.

WordPress is a popular format for blogs—an open-source content management system. It is also the backbone for WP-OPAC, a pushing-the-envelope project from Casey Bisson, information architect at Plymouth State University (PSU), NH, which will use Library of Congress (LC) catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. Bisson was presented with a $50,000 Mellon award for Technology Collaboration for the project at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in Washington, DC, on December 4. PSU will use the money for the LC records. The WP-OPAC will allow users to tag and comment on records, which will be more readily searchable by search engines. The still-emerging project represents a challenge to business as usual for catalogers. OCLC has been the source for catalog records for libraries, and its license restrictions do not permit reuse or distribution. However, LC catalog records have been shared via Z39.50 for several years without incident. “Libraries’ online presence is broken. We are more than study halls in the digital age. For too long, libraries have been coming up with unique solutions for common problems,” Bisson said. “Users are looking for an online presence that serves them in the way they expect.” PSU is committed to supporting Bisson’s project, and will be offering it as a free download from its site, likely in the form of sample records plus WordPress with WP-OPAC included. The internal data structure works with iCal for calendar information and Flickr for photos, and can be used with historical records. It allows libraries to go beyond LC subject headings, Bisson said. Other winners include: Open University (Moodle), RPI (bedework), University of British Columbia Vancouver (Open Knowledge Project), Virginia Tech (Sakai), Yale (CAS single signon), University of Washington (pine and IMAP), Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), and Humboldt State University (Moodle).

We would like your help with a survey on the topic of image indexing. We would like to gain a better understanding of how subject knowledge and indexing experience affect image indexing. We are interested in your participation because of your educational background and, or your experience with visual materials.

Participation in the survey is anonymous and voluntary. You may refuse to participate or discontinue participation at any time. If you have any questions about the survey you are welcome to contact us kate.mccain@drexel.edu, or jeb56@drexel.edu at any time about the survey. You may also contact Drexel University’s IRB Office at 215 875-5849 or at research@drexel.edu.

The online survey, consisting of ten questions and viewing-indexing of eight images, should take less than 30 minutes of your time. Your assistance in providing invaluable information about this topic is much appreciated.